Picture of the Week: Supermoon Eclipse over Dallas

I’m back at it on the blog again, and I waited an extra day for this week’s picture of the week so I could make it a doozy. Last night was a fairly rare supermoon eclipse. The trifecta of a harvest moon, super moon, and total lunar eclipse won’t happen again until 2033 so I knew I needed to get a good picture while it was there for the taking.

This was probably the hardest image I’ve ever tried to take. I won’t bore you with the complexities of it (at least until the For the photographers section below), suffice it to say my poor iMac almost melted trying to process all the data.

So, without further ado, here it is: Dallas Eclipsed

Dallas Eclipsed, by Andy Luten

For the photographers

This one was a doozy. Lots of Photoshop, as you’d expect. The base image was actually shot halfway into the eclipse and was about 15 seconds at f8, ISO 100. The moon pictures were taken about 4-5 minutes apart with me having to manually adjust/guess the exposure (ranged anywhere from 1/100s to 2.5″).

I edited the base picture (basically the skyline, bridge, and road) in Lightroom and then Nik Color Efex Pro 4. I then threw it into Photoshop for a High Pass layer of sharpening. Separately, I took 120 pictures of the moon and put them into Photoshop as layers (which took about 2 hours to load in!). From there I went through all of the pictures and picked out the layers that led to a more or less even path through the sky. I layered those in using layer masks on the main image and either Screen or Lighten blending modes. I then brought up the exposure on all of the moon “slices”. From there I ended up with a pretty good composite and went back into Lightroom for some White Balance adjustments. Only 5 hours later I ended up with what I considered to be a pretty good final product! Would love to hear your thoughts.